Quality, difficulty of the "new" kaplan qbank?

[tfom08]

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I am thinking about buying a 12 month subscription to either Kaplan or UW to study for shelf exams and get ready for step 2 at the same time. I was originally planning on buying UW, but now I've heard Kaplan might be good too. They are essentially the same price (Kaplan $30 more), so I am just wondering which would be the better method. I've heard that Kaplan isn't very difficult, but then a few messages since the kaplan qbank was updated have made it sound like the new qbank is even harder than UW. It seems like the hardest possible questions would be ideal for shelf studying, so I started thinking maybe kaplan would be better during the year, but I'm not sure if it is really any better since the change. I'd really appreciate input from anyone regarding this. Thanks.

 

[cgrays3]

The new q bank is really difficult. It is very nit picky and i think is not at the same level with any other question material i have seen. I would stick with world and go to kaplan if time allows. But i think the new q bank sucks👎

 

[JelicMD]

The questions are very difficult...i'm averaging a 60% on kaplan and an 72% on Uworld. The questions are very detailed, and the explanations I feel are not as good as Uworld. I do like the "on call" feature for explanations..where there is a recorded explanation from the kaplan instructor, but i've done about 1200 questions and I think i've come across only 5 questions that have had that. As far as which is more like CK...i'll let you know in September.

 

[cgrays3]

I think the explanations are pretty poor. I especially hate how they seem to not discuss parts of the question...for example saying that 3 people at work also had the same illness in a Botulism question. I think that the explanations end up just being factoids on the answer and not discussions of the quesiton

 

[GLW102]

I'll have to disagree with some points above. First, I did some of UW after Kaplan, so was exposed to both. I found Kaplan to be more difficult (8/10, while UW was a 7/10), but the nit-pickiness was about the same (look at some of the threads on this website alone). I got 70% overall for Kaplan and 74% on the last 300. Also, the explanations at times on both sets are lacking, that's too be expected with 2K+ questions. I thought it was just fine, and I finished it and went over my wrong answers and it prepared me more than well for CK. I think UW gets too much hype as being a God-send due to prior Kaplan CK Qbanks being very poor, but the new Kaplan is just as good in preparing people for CK as UW is. A classmate of mine went up 45 points on his Step 2 with just using Kaplan and Crush. I only went up 6 points, but I got a 245 on Step 1 so wasn't looking to do too much better. And hey, on 3weeks prep with 95% Kaplan, I'll take my 251. 🙂